Accounting for women in national plans and budgets

Commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment mean little without adequate planning and investment to turn promises into action. Deficits in funding are typically wide, however, while national plans overlook opportunities for advancement. UN Women provides knowledge and tools, and fosters national dialogues to make plans and budgets do more for women. In 2014, we engaged with 73 countries, strengthening gender equality priorities at the national and local levels.

Gender-responsive budgeting

Gender-responsive budgeting was not well known in Jordan, until the 2013 budget circular required all ministry plans and budgets to include a gender dimension-a move advocated by UN Women. The next step was implementation. Working closely with the National Women's Commission and the General Budget Department, we helped teach staff in key ministries how to move forward.

The training opened their eyes to various measures they could take to look at how well-or not-plans and budgets were taking Jordan closer to gender equality, and what could be done to redress gaps. It also opened ministry coffers. Budget allocations for gender equality increased from US$1.9 billion in 2013 to US$2.15 billion in 2014. In the area of health care, for example, this has meant that more women are covered by health insurance, and have access to expanded reproductive health and family planning services. Funds for vaccines and medicines specifically for women have more than doubled. For the first time, a citizen's budget brochure has been issued, showing people at large the breakdown of funds for gender equality./p>

Countries across Europe are increasingly tapping UN Women's widely recognized and unique expertise in gender-responsive budgeting. In the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the Government in 2014 adopted a method to integrate gender across selected programme budgets of all central institutions within five years. Moldova took steps to extend gender-responsive budgeting to the local level, as part of decentralizing government functions. Ukraine introduced local gender-responsive budgeting several years back, resulting in an increase in services for women and youth, and has now moved to apply the practice at regional and national levels. Serbia has expanded the use of gender-sensitive indicators at the provincial level that provide a precise picture of how well budgets support the achievement of gender equality goals.

National planning

Integrating gender equality considerations across all national plans and programmes means that services will reach women and respond to their specific needs. In India, UN Women helped the Ministry of Rural Development to insert comprehensive provisions in five flagship national economic empowerment programmes, covering core issues such as rural livelihoods, employment, social protection and housing. The schemes cover 35 states and union territories, and in 2014-2015 generated nearly 1 billion days of labour for rural women, and ensured that over a million homes were registered in women's names.

UN Women's sustained support has helped the Government of Timor-Leste build skills to integrate gender across national planning-28 of 41 state institutions included provisions to advance gender equality in their 2015 annual action plans. This means, for example, that the Ministry of Justice now trains staff on legal drafting that accounts for women's human rights. Expertise provided to the Ministry of Finance resulted in a requirement, embedded in a state budget circular, that all ministries include gender equality in annual planning and budgeting in 2015.

In China, UN Women worked with groups of women living with HIV to pinpoint stigma and gaps in services, and highlight these issues in reports to the Committee of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. The Committee's comments led to a national commitment for the new National Plan on HIV to take measures to eliminate discrimination against women living with HIV and support community women's organizations that assist them.

For the first time, supported by UN Women, groups of women living with HIV took part in formulating Mozambique's fourth national strategic plan on HIV/AIDS. Results of their advocacy included, for example, agreement to prioritize prevention programmes for adolescent girls, given a context where initiation rites and early marriages pose significant risks.

“It takes the combined outrage of media, civil society, the various religious faiths, educational institutions, and the ordinary citizens to push government to do the right thing.”

Women of achievement

Leonor Briones: A passionate advocate for public funds for social goods

Leonor Magtolis Briones has spent her life making sure that public funds produce public benefits. A former National Treasurer of the Philippines, she is today a distinguished professor and head convener of Social Watch Philippines.

Under her leadership, the group has mobilized in the streets, lobbied parliamentarians and used access to information laws to uncover hundreds of millions of dollars in pork barrel funds. Proper oversight means steering these to programmes that serve the greater good, such as by providing better health care and education.

Briones, well-known for her comprehensive insights into public finance and passionate commitment to good governance, believes the budget is the Philippines' most powerful tool in the face of many challenges. UN Women concurs, having supported a gender-budget exercise that helped more than double funds for gender and development programmes, from US$1.3 billion in 2013 to US$3.3 billion in 2014.